Did you notice they made Egyptian bread using ancient techniques and materials and modern live organisms, (Red Sea area is a particularly yeasty place,) and gave some baked bread to Ed Wood who declared it delicious? Huh? Did you notice that?

Ed Wood is the guy who started International Sourdoughs Co online. He's a scientist or a professor or something. He sells freeze-dried yeast cultures. One of his cultures is from this Red Sea area but it has nothing to do ancient process reconstruction.

With pages that you turn with your hands. One after the other, front side and back side, flippity-flip flip flip all the way through until all the pages are flipped and read and the tale completed.

Now, who would have even thought of that? Like a chopped up scroll with printing that continues on the back side of each chopped chunk. Imagine having to put one of those things together. In order. You'd have to number the pages just to keep track.

You might reasonably think the form suitable only for pop-up books but it turns out a lot of books have only words. No pictures, no maps, or anything other than words. Just words.

I could have written that whole historic essay.

I could have written that and made a sandwich on sourdough bread. On bread that I made myself from starter unique to my area.

I could have done all that wrapped up in a white bath towel and pretending to be ancient Egyptian baker, slave to my grain and my oven while master of my own little group of knucklehead bakers who also wear white bath towels for clothes.

My favorite part of the essay was the women discovering putting seeds into mud and watching what happens. It turns out I'm doing that exact same thing right now with chile seeds. While simultaneously hand-pollinating mature chile plants that I did that same thing to last year. Hand pollinating the two mature plants for lack of bees. You see, we are veritably beeless around here. And two of the little flowers broke off when I pushed them too hard. Live and learn, innit.